(Phys.org)—Today's photonic and plasmonic devices – the latter based on surface plasmons (a coherent delocalized electron oscillations that exist at the interface between metal and dielectric) and combining the small ...

NASA's recent discovery of 12 more exoplanets, including the most Earth-like yet, brings the number of exoplanets – those outside our solar system – discovered to nearly 2,000. It's now thought that almost every star ...

The manipulation of light has led to many applications that have revolutionized society through communications, medicine and entertainment. Devices consuming the energy of electromagnetic radiation, such as absorbers and ...

Light becomes trapped as it orbits within tiny granules of a crystalline material that has increasingly intrigued physicists, a team led by University of California, San Diego, physics professor Michael Fogler has found.

University of California, Berkeley, physicists have used graphene to build lightweight ultrasonic loudspeakers and microphones, enabling people to mimic bats or dolphins' ability to use sound to communicate and gauge the ...

Nanfang Yu, assistant professor of applied physics at Columbia Engineering, and colleagues from the University of Zürich and the University of Washington, have discovered two key strategies that enable Saharan silver ants ...

After 15 years of measurement and another eight years of scrutinizing and calculation, the particle physics collaborations H1 and ZEUS have published the most precise results about the innermost structure and behaviour of ...

(Phys.org)—Physicists have theoretically shown that it is possible to transmit information from one location to another without transmitting energy. Instead of using real photons, which always carry energy, the technique ...

Electromagnetism

Electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental interactions in nature. The other three are the strong interaction, the weak interaction and gravitation. Electromagnetism is the force that causes the interaction between electrically charged particles; the areas in which this happens are called electromagnetic fields.

Electromagnetism is responsible for practically all the phenomena encountered in daily life, with the exception of gravity. Ordinary matter takes its form as a result of intermolecular forces between individual molecules in matter. Electromagnetism is also the force which attracts electrons to an atomic nucleus to form atoms, which are the building blocks of molecules. This governs the processes involved in chemistry, which arise from interactions between the electrons of neighboring atoms.

Electromagnetism manifests as both electric fields and magnetic fields. Both fields are simply different aspects of electromagnetism, and hence are intrinsically related. Thus, a changing electric field generates a magnetic field; conversely a changing magnetic field generates an electric field. This effect is called electromagnetic induction, and is the basis of operation for electrical generators, induction motors, and transformers. Mathematically speaking, magnetic fields and electric fields are convertible with relative motion as a four vector.

Electric fields are the cause of several common phenomena, such as electric potential (such as the voltage of a battery) and electric current (such as the flow of electricity through a flashlight). Magnetic fields are the cause of the force associated with magnets.

In quantum electrodynamics, electromagnetic interactions between charged particles can be calculated using the method of Feynman diagrams, in which we picture messenger particles called virtual photons being exchanged between charged particles. This method can be derived from the field picture through perturbation theory.

The theoretical implications of electromagnetism led to the development of special relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905.